To read an excerpt Contents:
- Introduction
- Paris
- The Track
- Two Sides of the Same Coin
- Crimea
- Sins, Vices, Perversions, and Harmful Habits
- Between Cause and Effect
- Epilogue
Every time I wrote a new book, I would experience illnesses or life-threatening situations. Perhaps, it was a way of forcing me to make an internal sacrifice so that there would be more love in my soul, and the resulting book would be purer. I used to forget about voluntary sacrifice and received involuntary sacrifice instead. Fortunately, I learned to deal with it calmly. Well, if the book is titled «Parenting», then sacrifice is probably necessary. After all, nature gives us the opportunity to have children so that we learn to give love and make sacrifices.
Interestingly, when you engage in a certain topic and constantly contemplate it, everything that happens to you will also be related to it. In the summer of 2008, I dedicated my efforts to understanding what kind of person the future should be. I clearly understood that if the dependency on the future is not overcome, there will be no future for me or others. At that time, I had two schemes for overcoming such dependency. The first way was to renounce the future. According to this scheme, the greedy one can be saved if they renounce money. The future is connected with consciousness, goals, plans. According to Indian philosophy, overcoming the dependency on the future is achieved through asceticism, renunciation of social ties, plans, goals, and tasks. At the highest level, it is the cessation of consciousness, renunciation of consciousness as one of the main functions of a human being. To some extent, Orthodox monks continued this tradition. Leaving the family, severing social ties, solitude, a vow of silence, renunciation of one's will—all of this provided liberation from the future, its overcoming. The second way was to preserve love when the future was falling apart. When betrayal occurred, when dreams and hopes were shattered, when misfortunes befell by fate.
My purification proceeded along the second path. In my life, I periodically found myself in hopeless situations, as if hitting a wall, with a sense of hopelessness and the collapse of hopes. My consciousness stubbornly repeated to me: you have no chance to survive, you have no chance to achieve anything. And then I would discard my drowning consciousness and survive by relying on some new strength. In the complete collapse of consciousness, I survived through a feeling that told me that there are no hopeless situations, that there is always an answer in any task, and that from above, you are given exactly what is needed for development. And my consciousness changed, and I found a way out.
